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The Toronto Sun has done an interview with Bret Hart that was conducted a few days after he was released from hospital. In the interview, Hart gives an update on his condition after suffering a stroke during a bike accident several weeks ago. The interview also features comments from other Hart family members regarding the accident, including Martha Hart, the widow of Owen Hart.
Bret Hart is suffering from some paralysis, but he hasn't lost his sense of humour.
About two months after suffering a stroke that has lessened his ability to use the left side of his body, the pro wrestling icon can still manage to laugh about his affliction.
"I'm lucky it never affected my memory or my thinking skills ... (at least) that I know of," he said in an exclusive interview with The Toronto Sun from Calgary, a couple days after his release from hospital.
Hart, known as The Hitman, suffered a stroke after hitting a small pothole during a daily bicycle ride in his home town and banging the top of his head on the ground. He had not been wearing a helmet, which he routinely does, because the chin strap had broken. He had intended to take the helmet to be fixed rather than buy a new one.
Hart, 45, is dressed in his usual attire -- baseball cap, T-shirt, shorts and running shoes -- and the physical effects are not as noticeable on this powerfully built man as one might imagine. The 5-foot-11, 230-pound Hart walks a little stiffly, can't move his left hand and shoulder as freely as the right, his smile is unnatural, he tires if he talks for more than 15 minutes because of vocal-chord damage, and has blurriness in the left eye. However, he has made remarkable strides. He started walking again within 10 days of the fall, a significant achievement given it takes some people a month or more and some don't recover at all.
In the early days of the stroke, he required nursing assistance to go to the bathroom and take a shower, something he considered extremely humbling.
And, he's actually in pretty good spirits, considering the stroke is only the latest episode in a string of personal and professional incidents that have rocked him and his family during the past three years. Earlier this year, one of Bret's brothers-in-law, Davey Boy Smith -- whom Bret had wrestled with and against, but in recent years had numerous personal differences which were aired in public -- died suddenly, believed to have been related to years of steroid and prescription drug abuse. Hart's mother, Helen, succumbed to the effects of having various seizures last year, only a few months after her grizzled husband, Stu, a star wrestler in his younger days and later a prominent promoter, had been hospitalized with pneumonia and heart problems but recovered. Bret's youngest brother, Owen, died in a tragic wrestling fall in 1999, after which his wife, Martha, slapped the World Wrestling Federation with a wrongful death lawsuit and was awarded $18 million US in an out-of-court settlement.
And Bret's bittersweet career, which at one time had him rated as the top wrestler in the world in 1993 and '94 and included seven individual or tag-team titles with the WWF, with which he later had a highly publicized split, came to an end two years ago. Doctors advised him to retire because of concussion problems, influenced by a kick he absorbed in the ring with the World Championship Wrestling circuit in 1999. He believes the trauma from the bike fall may have been related to the concussions.
"Over the course of the year, with all the (misfortune) that has happened to the family, I didn't need this on top of all that," Hart said. "I do have a better spirit now than I did (initially) because I do believe I'll get a full recovery."
Hart's accident happened while riding along a pathway en route to an area where people had gathered to protest a G-7 summit meeting. Ironically, as he rode down the steep part of the hill, Hart told himself he'd never ride again without a helmet.
"I was cutting through the grass just off the pathway and I was actually coasting up the crest of a hill in a very relaxed way and I hit a pothole that was really camouflaged," he said. "It didn't look like anything when I went over it. It was about the size of a frisbee and about six inches deep. I hit the front tire and it wobbled me and, when the back tire hit, it caused me to fall over. It wasn't like I was thrown 10 feet or spiked on my head or anything. If anything, it probably looked like nothing. You would have thought I'd get up and dust myself off.
"When it happened, I thought: 'How embarrassing.' It was a really pathetic kind of tumble. It looked like a toddler trying to do a headstand. I got whipped to the ground and I really hurt my back. It felt like somebody had speared me like a fish in the river."
Lying on the grass he saw silver dots in the left eye, similar to what he had experienced when he had post-concussion syndrome. Figuring he had pinched a nerve, Hart pulled himself up and tried to climb back aboard his bike, but couldn't lift his left leg over the seat and fell back over. He then called his wife, Julie, from whom he is separated but still maintains a relationship, on the cell phone to pick him up. She immediately noticed that Bret's left eye stood out sizeably compared to the right one.
He fell over while holding on to his daughter and decided then to call for an ambulance. He was strapped to a stretcher and sent to the emergency unit at a nearby hospital.
The medical staff put him through physical tests to determine the feeling in his extremities, along with CAT scans and two MRIs.
All the while, his emotional stage ranged between fear and doubt.
At one point, he told Julie and his personal co-ordinator, Marcy Engelstein, he'd be home drinking coffee in a couple hours.
He had minor feeling in his fingers and toes, which was considered a good sign but, some 15 hours after he entered the hospital, the doctors told him he had suffered a stroke caused by a blocked artery in his brain.
In the days that followed his stay, he became anxious about his condition.
"During that first week I was getting pretty worried I would be paralyzed," he said. "All the well-intended advice that people are saying wasn't washing anymore. When you have a stroke you become really emotional. Everyone's emotional, especially when you get up to the stroke ward. People are having emotional breakdowns and every few seconds they start crying. You're on a floor with a bunch of older people and they get so depressed and so emotionally wrought -- as I did.
"The whole thing is really tough. You can't talk to someone and explain it to them and get the sentence finished without crashing. You'd be talking to the doctors to control that and they tell you it's all normal. It's all part of the stroke.
"I had a stream of visitors constantly and I was very tired. I learned that one hour of physio is the equivalent of one whole day of downhill skiing. I was trying to pick up dice and put them in a cup and I couldn't do it. When I closed my hand, I couldn't open it up. I couldn't believe it. One day I was lifting 350 pounds and the next I can't even open up and close my hand. Picking up a dice and putting it into a cup, I might as well have tried to put 800 pounds over my head.
"You do physio for 30 minutes in the morning and when you go back to your room you nap for four hours. You're just so tired. It's such a mental and physical drain. You become really discouraged and really down. It was bad. I think you hit bottom pretty quick. The whole thing is about as depressing as you can get."
Hart had tremendous support from family and friends. His father, who is well into his 80s and suffers various physical problems, visited him regularly
"He has been through so much, I think it really bothered him," Bret said. "He became almost obsessed about coming to see me all the time and it really took a lot out of him. When he saw me in the wheelchair, I could see it really bothered him."
Bret was also visited early into his hospital stay by sister-in-law Martha, with whom he had an extremely close relationship. Bret supported Martha in the turbulent WWF lawsuit, which split the family.
"I felt so terrible for him," Martha said. "It was at the height of the paralysis. He was dependent on other people. It was really hard for me to see him that way. And then he got emotional seeing me like that. It was very emotional for both of us."
Walter Gretzky, father of hockey legend Wayne Gretzky, whom Hart knows, phoned to offer encouragement. The elder Gretzky had an aneurysm several years ago and lost some of his memory, but has otherwise made a great recovery.
Hart even had a phone call from Vince McMahon Jr., the owner of World Wrestling Entertainment (formerly the World Wrestling Federation), who at one time had been like a second father to him but in later years became someone he couldn't trust. There has been some recent softening between the two since their famous parting in November 1997 -- Hart punched McMahon in the eye feeling his boss had screwed him -- but Hart is still adamant he doesn't want to return to the company in any capacity.
An overwhelming amount of support came from the Calgary community. Last week, a special day was held for Hart in which people could sign a massive card and bid on items with the proceeds going to charity. Hart could not attend because of mandatory physiotherapy.
"Even now (the doctors) won't say you'll have a 100% recovery because it's impossible for them to say," he said. "People will come up to you on the stroke ward and say: 'I had a stroke at Christmas and I'm fine now,' or `Don't worry, you'll be fine.' That kind of gives you hope. Those little conversations kind of keep the fire going inside of you.
"(The doctors) told me I'm on the fast track to recovery, which is hard to believe. I haven't seen any real gains in my walking or my arm strength, but I know they're there because I can do little things more with my hand than I could do a week ago. And I'm noticing now I'm getting a bit of a smile back on my left side. A few days ago no matter how hard I tried, my smile was just a scary sneer. You try to make facial expressions and show shock or concern or joy and you can't. You become very deadpan. There's nothing there."
To anyone who has followed the Hart family's trials and tribulations in and out of the ring, Bret's accident seemed to suggest the clan is cursed, not unlike the Kennedys. Stu and Helen had 12 children, eight of whom became wrestlers and four who married wrestlers, and their triumphs and tragedies have become routine material for the media.
"No, I don't think we're cursed," said Alison, one of the four Hart daughters. "If we're cursed, we're cursed and (also) blessed. We've been fortunate to have amazing people around us and, unfortunately, some of them are gone now.
"It's unfortunate the public has to hear all the negative, but all of our celebrations the public hears about, too. I don't see it as a curse."
"I think if you look around you'll find lots of families who have had worse things," Bret said.
"This is just a bad stroke of luck," he added with an unintended pun about his own condition. "I have really been fortunate to have lived a blessed life. I don't know that there's ever a good reason for something like this to happen.
"I had somebody say that I may look back on this as being the best thing that could have happened. I said not a chance."
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